Automation of Higher Education, the matrix needed by the market

                                                                        Rosario Rivera Quintero

The increased use of technology in education is more evident nowadays than before. Universities and educational institutions are investing and rushing trying to implement virtual courses and offering tuition in which technology plays a supreme role. Consequently  universities are going to disappear in the future or at least they will be no longer as we know them today.

It is marvelous how we can have unlimited access to any kind of information or products through internet. People can learn, buy or sell, be connected with other people around the world, know many cultures, work or be entertained through it. We are potential consumers of whatever it comes through it.

Using Internet to have access to any service or information, where people can buy or obtain unlimited services, why not  offer tuition this way? Education becomes then  a very interesting product to be sold. Education is seen as merchandise and a very profitable land for investors and private companies who count on and have a vast target community of consumers worldwide.

If universities tend to disappear in the future as we know them today under the premise that virtual education is a must, so universities have to be ready and start to create the necessary infrastructure, otherwise they will be left behind. They have to be competitive, they have to create a large range of courseware enough competitive to be in force in the market.

And who is behind all this? At the end of the day who is receiving the profits and benefits? Few courseware producers, coordinators, deans, consortiums, hackers, IBM, cable companies, Microsoft? Who is going to control it or regulate it? What is going to happen with intellectual property? Who is going to have the monopoly? What is the role of the State? What is the role of teachers and students? Can everybody have access to it? In this new era, you’d better become an expert creating effective courseware or you will be no longer in the market. Universities had better enroll the best marketing chains or they will die.

It is hard for me to imagine a university interested in only making money, it is hard for me to visualize it virtual, not as a land where people can converge, discuss, argue and create knowledge. It was within a community of philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, musicians, actors who came together and from whom I got a minimum sense of life.

It was there where I could feel them, smell them, touch them, laugh and perhaps share a coffee. Some would say, well you can do the same in a virtual community, or people will find the way, well, for me it is not the same. It was there where I started to be conscious about the others, we looked for changes, we were interested in human beings and values rather than in making money. Universities and we  teachers can benefit from the technology in all its forms, but we cannot forget our role in forming human beings whose ultimate goal cannot be making money.